Kong AI Gateway Engineer

LPL Financial•Fort Mill, SC

1d•$101,970 - $169,950

About The Position

LPL Financial has a Senior Middleware Engineer opening who will assist in building and maintaining Kong AI gateway platform. The middleware group is responsible for operational aspect of Kong AI gateway platform including upgrading, building patterns and working with various development teams to enable onboarding of MCP and LLM traffic through Kong gateway. The role will blend software engineering, AI/LLM integration and API gateway expertise with strong communication skills. This is an opportunity to work on building AI integration capability for the whole enterprise. The role focuses on enabling secure, scalable, and standardized onboarding of LLM and MCP traffic through a shared AI gateway platform used by multiple product and engineering teams.

Requirements

Minimum of 6 years of relevant software development, middleware, and/or platform engineering experience
Proven track record in enterprise API platforms or integration layers to design and manage scaleable API ecosystems
Hands-on implementation experience with Kong API and AI gateway and/or API integrations in enterprise environments
Practical working knowledge of APIs, microservices, and containerized architectures
Proficient in Linux environments including Cloud and Development tooling
Experience with building and deploying software solutions using AI Coding Agents
Experience with application development and multiple programming languages required
Experience with Lua scripting and strong knowledge of various Kong plugins and deployment through Terraform
Experience with major cloud providers such as GCP, AWS, and Azure
Understanding of AI/LLM concepts and interaction with LLM APIs and MCP servers
Strong organizational and change management skills with an ability to manage competing demands
Proven team player and solution builder who loves to work collaboratively in a fast-growing dynamic environment
BS in Computer Science / B.A. or equivalent technical development experience

Nice To Haves

Experience with Google Apigee or IBM API Connect or Data Power a plus

Responsibilities

Collaborating internally with our Product and Technology teams so they can get the most value out of Kong Platform
Developing internal solutions & tools for the organization to help us push our technical boundaries and improve our ability to deliver AI integration to the organization
Writing or editing technical documentation and knowledge base articles for the solutions you develop
Maintain and upkeep Kong platform
Configure and develop Kong plugins for authentication, rate limiting (including token-based throttling), logging, and transformation